New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz doesn't like me. Here's why. Twenty years ago he wildly promoted Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial. First he ran a review (by Ronald Sanders) praising Peters's book. Then he himself joined the chorus of praise. Apart from being a fanatical "supporter" of Israel , Peretz has fantasized that he's a thinker. He tends to marry rich, and has used his endowment (as it were) to purchase a magazine and an adjunct teaching position at Harvard. I have too much respect for Harvard to believe that they would hire him on merit. This ivory tower Anna Nicole Smith also endows academic chairs for other solid B minus lunatics like Ruth Wisse (she's written the definitive history of mah jong tournaments in the Catskills). In a breathless New Republic column, Peretz suggested that there wasn't a single factual error in Peters's book - which was true, but only in the trivial sense that it contained no facts. He went on to say that if read, Peters's book "will change the mind of our generation. If understood, it could affect the history of the future."
It didn't turn out quite this way. I stumbled on Peters's book while working on my doctoral dissertation. Peters's claim, apparently supported by some 2000 endnotes, was that Palestine had been empty on the eve of Zionist colonization and that, after the Zionist settlers made the desert bloom, Arabs from neighboring countries surreptitiously entered Palestine to take advantage of the new economic opportunities and pretended to be indigenous to the land. Zionist crazies like Peretz ate it up. Perplexed by Peters's claim, I sat down for several weeks and scrutinized the book's scholarly apparatus.[1] It proved to be a threadbare hoax: all the cited documents had been faked or grossly misrepresented, and the demographic numbers falsified. I tried communicating my findings in a letter to the New Republic . Peretz refused to publish it. Later, his literary editor Leon Wieseltier - who, according to Gore Vidal, has "very important hair" - promised to comment on the scandal in the pages of the magazine "sooner or later, probably sooner." Twenty years later one still waits, not just for sooner but for later. After the New York Times ran an article quoting Israel's leading authority on Palestinian nationalism to the effect that Peters's book was a "sheer forgery" (Yehoshua Porath), Peretz wrote an angry reply asserting that it was all just a leftist conspiracy.
In subsequent years Peretz became the chief promoter of Holocaust industry blowhard Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners. (Raul Hilberg, world's leading authority on the Nazi holocaust, pronounced the book "worthless.") It no doubt didn't boost my stock with Golddigger when I co-authored a book, A Nation on Trial, exposing Goldhagen. Wieseltier tried to block its publication but the wonderful Sara Bershtel of Metropolitan Books stood firm. A Nation on Trial was eventually named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Now Peretz and his cabal of Zionist crazies (in fact, they are not Zionists; just run-of-the-mill opportunists for whom Israel is a useful vehicle for upward mobility) want to stop me from getting tenure. I do not dismiss negative judgments of my scholarship. Perhaps what I write is useless; it's hard for the author to be objective. But, really, who is Peretz to render judgment? A word of praise from Peretz is the tell-tale sign that the object of praise is schlock. Peretz claims that the trajectory of my academic career has been one of "downward mobility." Let us leave to one side how much responsibility I bear, and how much the likes of him bear, for this curvature of the arc. This much I'll grant, though: while not having a clue about the subjects he pontificates on, this hideous mountebank is an unrivalled expert on "mobility," especially of the upward kind when you are running on empty. A book by him on this subject I would surely read with interest.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=572
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam